I read somewhere - and I may be misremembering, I do sometimes - it's me age - that the miscreants were tied to the cross and left there to die, not nailed. If this is true then the whole thing is a hoax.
Starbuck, some were nailed to the cross - but the nails were placed between bones in the wrist - not through the palm of the hand because that wouldn't have held the weight of the body. The hand would have simply ripped.
Thanks for the info u.mmmm and naomi. With a bit of luck they would have hit an artery and so enabled the person to die quickly. But perhaps they were too experienced in torture for that.
Its strange how stigmata only occurr on those parts of the body most often exposed to the depradations of biting insects. I currently have a stigmatum on my left ankle, it is going slowly so I am beginning to feel better about ascending to heaven on a pillar of fire(or not).
When someone who loves Jesus receives the wounds of Jesus (as most notably and recently St Padre Pio) the first explanation is that the wounds are physical manifestations of the loving sympathy of the believer with His Redeemer.
the proof that it is self inflicted lies inthe fact that before people figured out that the nails would have to have been in the wrists, people generally believed the nails went through the palms, mainly because statues and paintings depicted it happening this way...and this is the mininformation they followed when cooking up their devious little schemes
if stigmata was genuine, it would happen to the wrists...this supposedly divine event would pay no heed to the assumptions of a few paintings done by humans...
i have no doubt that the godsquad will have some grasping and tenuous excuse to explain away this ... i also have no doubt that i will file it under claptrap with the rest of it...
Geezer, who has never had the stigmata, can still pass judgment on those like Padre Pio, who have. Amazing. There are false cases, there are true cases. If you must through out your own discriminating powers because certain answers will never be acceptable to you, then why pretend to be asking. St Francis was hardly a fraud. And at the least, his stigmata with his explanation are head and shoulders above your lack of stigmata and your self-justifying 'explanation'.